Who builds this, and why

Every calorie tracker starts the same way. It asks your height, your weight, your age and how active you think you are, runs those through a formula from the 1990s, and hands you a number. Then it leaves the number there.

The number is an estimate with roughly 10% of error in it before you start, and it goes out of date while you use it, because a body that has been in a deficit for six weeks does not burn what it burned in week one. So the plan stops working, and the app it is running in has no idea, because nothing in it is measuring anything.

WhispCal exists to close that loop. It compares what you log against what your weight actually does, works out the burn your body is really running at, and moves the target when the two stop agreeing. The formula is a starting guess. Your data is the evidence.

One person writes the app, the website and everything on it, which has consequences worth being honest about. It moves quickly and it is opinionated. There is no support team, so an email goes to the person who wrote the code. There is also nobody to overrule a bad decision, which is why the Journal exists: the reasoning gets written down where it can be argued with.

The app is React Native on iOS and Android, on top of Supabase. The site is open about its numbers. Where a claim can be measured it is measured, and where it cannot be, it says so instead.

It will not sell your data, which is easy to promise and worth writing down anyway. It will not run ads between you and a meal you are logging. It will not gamify eating, because a streak is a bad reason to log something and a worse reason to eat something.

It also will not pretend to be a clinician. It is a measurement tool with an opinion about calories, and for anything medical the right answer is a person, not an app.

Bugs, disagreements and feature requests all go to the same place: whispcal@gmail.com. See contact for what is useful to include.